Memory, archives, and the fall of the Rhodes Statue

 

June Bam-Hutchison

"What does it mean to engage in the intellectual life of a university stammering and staggering its way to a new sense of self in a post-apartheid South Africa?" – Professor Garrey Dennie

The APC held its first research development workshop of 2015 from 7 to 9 April. These workshops are intended to bring established scholars together with APC students to develop research projects and to facilitate the asking of new questions. The focus in the workshops is on the facilitation of emergent forms of scholarship. 

The April workshop coincided with the removal of the Rhodes statue in the presence of hundreds, as a result of the student-led "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign. First addressed directly by the APC in a 2011 seminar, where a student memorably called for a confrontation – for the statue to be turned around to face UCT – the Rhodes statue is an especially visible example of the academy’s own multiple-form archive. That archive is a primary object of the APC’s critical attention, and is the focus of the APC’s banner line, following Njabulo Ndebele, that "there can be no transformation of the curriculum, or indeed of knowledge itself, without an interrogation of archive". The "Rhodes Must Fall" Campaign and the critical impulses driving it were thus threaded into the very fabric of the April workshop. The discussion throughout was committed, intense and diverse. 

Visiting Professor Garrey Dennie of History at St Mary’s College of Maryland (US) presented a paper entitled “Beneath the Stones of Memory: private stories, public commemorations, and the many lives of Chatoyer”. On the workshop in general, Dennie reflected:

Across the broad range of papers presented at the workshop, three points deserve particular recognition. First, whether explicitly or implicitly, all the papers confronted the fact that acts of remembrance, memorialization, and commemorations are value laden processes derived in concert with or in conflict against systems of order that resist the disruptive capacity inherent within efforts to retrieve or organize historical knowledge to suit the present circumstances.

Second, the gathering of students and faculty remained cognizant that only a critical and reflective posture could allow new vistas of knowledge to become available.  In seeking to make the familiar unfamiliar and to make the inaccessible accessible, the workshop was able to pose questions hitherto closed off to the gathering. What does the struggle to create an archive of the Black presence in Britain have to do with the “struggle” in South Africa? What can the British colonial reach in the eighteenth century Caribbean tell us about British colonialism in South Africa? And what might the collection, preservation, and display of the photographs of dead Africans tell us about the processes through which archives render meanings on clothes, Namibians seek the repatriation of dead bodies, and South African and Indonesian musical traditions challenge new audience to contemplate their historical trajectories?

And third, in an environment where some of the participants were actively participating in the “Rhodes Must Go” campaign, and all were deeply attuned to the timing of when his statue would be removed from the university, we could not evade the question: what does it mean to engage in the intellectual life of a university stammering and staggering its way to a new sense of self in a post- apartheid South Africa? 

... As xenophobia grips disenchanted segments of South Africa’s population, as students occupy administrative offices of UCT, as Black faculty express deeper concerns about their place at the university, and yes, as Rhodes’ statue falls, questions must be asked of the capacity of South African universities in general, and the UCT in particular, to construct an intellectual environment within which the free exchange of ideas grounded within innovative research protocols could flourish. In this regard the recently concluded workshop held by the APC is quite reassuring.

Visiting Professor Hakim Adi of History at Chichester University (UK), founder of Black and Asian Studies and trustee of the Black Cultural Archives, presented on “Overcoming Eurocentrism and disinformation: The struggle for the history and heritage of the African Diaspora in Britain”. He observed that “the students of UCT alerted South Africa and the world to something astonishing: over 20 years after the fall of apartheid, a statue of the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes still gazed serenely over the campus of South Africa’s oldest institution of higher learning. Here was a colonial institution that was troubling.”

Professor Adi asked hard-hitting questions throughout the workshop about the reality of post-apartheid South Africa and curriculum transformation; whether the struggle against apartheid (including by the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, of which he was a part) had in fact delivered the positive legacy that he and others had hoped for.

As Adi saw it, “It became clear that students learned little if anything in their undergraduate degrees about the general history of Africa and, so they told me, not much more about the history of their own country. Some studies at UCT appeared to be rooted in a bygone era of South African exceptionalism, while discussion about the history curriculum at the university was almost a taboo subject.”

Adi felt that he had perhaps been naïve in thinking that in Cape Town veteran fighters such as Johnny Gomas, a member of so many organisations including the ICU and ANC, would be household names among students, to which APC research associate Zuleiga Adams responded that Gomas was in fact very well known in certain circles. Whilst UCT has a precinct named after Cissie Gool, it may perhaps be due to its lesser prominence in the deep colonial architecture that Adi observed that he had expected liberation figures from the Western Cape to be more likely to have memorials at UCT named after them than the likes of the more significantly visible and overpowering Cecil John Rhodes and Leander Starr Jameson. 

Professor Gesine Kruger, of the Department of History, University of Zurich, spoke “On Colonial Photography. Acts of Circulation, Redefinition and Appropriation”. For her, matters were not cut and dried, as “those symbols, statues, sites might be more useful as intellectual 'stumbling blocks' – given that the demanded space is really provided by the university (and society) for further discussions concerning curriculum and other important questions.

"My personal opinion” Kruger noted, “is that this particular space, this pedestal, should remain empty to leave space and a place marker and may be a symbol for the students’ request and ability to open a debate and to claim this university being their own university. And last but not least the colonial and imperial statues are archives of a public culture that can never be cleansed of all historical 'poo'. Maybe we should keep the statues and do research on the workers and their families who made them.”

Easy answers to the many questions posed were not necessarily forthcoming. Dennie further noted that “some of us arrived at a deeper awareness of the sheer contingency of history and memory. This is liberating in the sense that it allows us to understand how old “truths” get replaced by new “truths” with no guarantee that this represents the "final" story.”     

Reflections on the campaign became an inevitable point of intellectual consideration throughout, with a particular focus on the implications for UCT curriculum transformation. Among others, Mbongiseni Buthelezi’s paper, “’Praises do not die out’: Remembering Zwide kaLanga as Father of the Ndwandwe”, provided the workshop with an emerging sense of what "decolonising knowledge" means. Discussion evoked diverse perspectives on the future of engaged, "decolonial" scholarship and what that means. It was at times sharp, at times unsettling and troubling, and at times necessarily provocative, reminding us that it was certainly no longer "business as usual". Scholars revisited the language we use, terms such as "tribe", "colonial", "decolonial", "pre-colonial" and "post-colonial". Were we talking about new concepts needing a new lexicon?

As put succinctly by Garrey Dennie, “In 1934, those who sought to memorialize Rhodes by placing his statue in a UCT place of prominence must have been convinced of the permanence of their action. Those who remove his statue today are equally convinced of its permanent departure from UCT. Hence, our second point: the APC workshop and the fall of Rhodes statue were mere coincidence. But this coincidence served to highlight the absolutely vital role of the workshop: providing the intellectual space where these critical issues could be explored.”

In this regard, workshop participants noted that questions that we were not able to pose with much ease in the past, could now be posed in an open way; voices could now be heard more clearly and be listened to (even those beyond race, such as class and gender; questions concerning what a post-apartheid university is and what it looks like; what is post-colonial; what is the nature of global capitalism and so on).                  

Other papers included (more or less in the order that they were presented): June Bam-Hutchison on “Divergence and confluence: The ongoing presence of the precolonial in the present – towards a critical appraisal of contemporary Khoisan identities in the Western Cape and their link to campaigns for social justice”; Carolyn Hamilton – “A Provocation to Discussion: Rethinking Pre-coloniality”; John Wright – “Working with South Africa’s Pasts 1400-1880: issues and engagements”; Saarah Jappie – “The multiple temporalities of the grave of Shaykh Yusuf in Indonesia”; Thokozani Mhlambi – “Ukuxhentsa kwaMiriam, A Thought Paper”; Memory Biwa – “Repossession of human bodies from Berlin to Windhoek”; Jo-Anne Duggan – “In and Out of the Archive, Jacquline Quin and Leon Meyer, Maseru, 20 December 1985: Images and Agency”; George Mahashe – “Subjectivity: subject–activity”; and Erica de Greef  – “The ‘absent presence’ of colonial bodies in a South African dress/fashion collection: a case study at Iziko Museums”.

The workshop also featured student participation from the APC’s cohort of new historical studies Honours students, Lauren White (school history textbooks), Kerusha Govender (researching Indian Identity in Cape Town) and Masters student, Rehana Odendaal, who delivered a working piece on “Exploring identity formation in African universities” which opened discussion on the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ debate. Newly recruited students who are aiming to register in 2016, Sibusisiwe Nxongo (from Gauteng) and Patrick Letsatsi (from Free State), also attended and engaged actively in discussions as part of their induction to the APC.